The first time Under the Dome showrunner Brian K. Vaughan met Stephen King to discuss adapting the master novelist’s 2009 dystopian tome for network television, the horror kingpin gave his instructions by way of another pop culture monarch.

“From our first meeting he told us, to quote Elvis, ‘It’s your baby, you rock it now,’” Vaughan, who wrote the pilot and is the CBS miniseries’ executive producer, alongside fellow former Lost veteran Jack Bender and E.R. scribe Neal Baer, recalled during a recent interview on the show’s Wilmington, North Carolina set.

Airing Mondays on CBS and Global television in Canada, Under the Dome maintains the same sociology experiment concept of King’s novel – which tells the story of how residents of a small American town cope with the sudden and mysterious appearance of a transparent dome around their city – but Vaughan, Baer and Bender went to great lengths to make sure that the high-production summer series (Each of the 13 episodes costs in the range of $3.5 million) is bigger, bolder and more viscerally immense than its source material. It also, Baer noted, has a very different ending than the original novel. ”Not that you’ll see it this season,” he laughed.

Sitting in the series’ diner, the Sweetbriar Rose, 65-year-old King recounted Under the Dome’s origin at the dawn of environmental social consciousness.

“I had the idea for Dome while I was teaching school in ’72. This was about two years before I wrote Carrie,” he said, referring to his breakout novel.

“It was around the time OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) began realizing that they could charge more than 11 cents per barrel and people started caring about global warming. But I just didn’t have the resources at that time, I had no time and no money and I couldn’t do the research. I got about 75 pages then.”

King would try to revisit the concept once again in 1982 with his unfinished novel The Cannibals, but that, too, never saw the light of day.

Nearly 30 years would pass before King would finally flesh out his concept. Stuck on a long flight to Melbourne and fearful of The rise of “political frat boy” George W. Bush’s war time policies, the novelist pondered, “‘We live on this little blue planet, this is what we have right here. We live under a dome that’s an atmosphere and the resources that we got are the resources that we got,’” he recalled. “I thought, ‘What if you took this town and you made it a microcosm of what’s going on’ – you have this leader who is not that bright but the guy who is second in command is the guy who makes all the decisions, he’s the iron fist inside the velvet glove. It’s the perfect position because you’ve got deniability.”

For the television event, a gamble on CBS’s behalf in the hopes of changing the landscape of reality-heavy summer network television, Vaughan, Bender and Baer chose to detach the series from its political axis, even removing the town’s Bush-esque councilmen character, and refining the concept to its philosophical anchors.

“We had many a discussion in the writer’s room about our political theory courses as undergraduates; about Hobbes and Hume and Rousseau,” Baer said, nodding as well to both Lord of the Flies and Bender and Vaughan’s previous, philosophy-heavy, series Lost (both of which get name-checked in King’s novel).

“We’re also very interested in Sartre: ‘What is hell but living with other people?”

“The idea is still the same,” King noted.

“What if you have somebody in power that’s making bad decisions and you can’t get out? What if you have (diminishing) resources – propane, gasoline, medicine, water? So it was basically that idea and taking those characters and running with them.”

“The Will to Power,” Norris, best known as playing D.E.A agent Hank Schrader on Breaking Bad, proclaimed. “Why people get so addicted to power. As the show goes on the Dome becomes this character (representing power).”

In the book, Big Jim is the Dick Cheney-esque Machiavellian behind the power, however Norris argued that in this incarnation, he is now stripped of his political leanings. “Bill Clinton could be just as hungry for power as Cheney,” the Harvard graduate said with a toothy grin.

For Montreal-born Rachelle LeFevre, “The Dome is our horror; the horror without reveals the horror within.”

The red headed Twilight vet plays a reporter who takes in the series’ mysterious hero Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Mike Vogel) in Under the Dome’s fictional town of Chester’s Mill or “Anytown, U.S.A” as Baer described it. The pilot also set up the flawed relationship between Big Jim and his son, Junior (Alexander Koch) – who just happens to be holding his girlfriend hostage in the family’s fall out bunker. Other main characters include an over her head police officer, a boy orphaned by the Dome and a well-to-to family who gets trapped while passing through town.

“Our show isn’t just one kind of show: It has the science fiction element, it has the mystery element, and it does have an epic – they’ve really worked hard to make it like a mini-movie each week,” LeFevre explained. “There’s something each week that will keep you hanging on and it’s also a really good character driven show.”

Echoing her statement, King warns that though Under the Dome’s philosophical concept and socially conscious rhetoric may sound heavy, the final product is still meant to be entertainment.

“Obviously, based on the things that have been on the American press lately, there is a (real life) dome and it involves your cell phone,” he said. “But this is not a politically charged story here. It’s not an allegory.”

Under the Dome airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on CBS and Global.

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